Memolane, The ‘Internet Time Machine,’ Announces Abrupt Shutdown As Team Joins Unnamed Company

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Updated.Memolane, the startup that helped users archive and explore social network activity across different platforms, is shutting down. The company announced the closure in a blog post published this afternoon.

The shutdown will be quite abrupt: Memolane accounts and content are set to be deleted tomorrow, February 22 (the company has not specified at what exact time this will occur.) All Memolane content is pulled in from existing social networking sites, of course, so the data will still be out there in its original format. But regardless, this is very short notice for a service to completely disband.

It’s almost always sad news when a startup doesn’t quite make it, but this seems to have a silver lining, albeit a very vague one. Memolane says its team is “joining another company that will utilize the Memolane features in an expanded way.” We’ve reached out to Memolane founder and CEO Eric Lagier for more details on which company is involved and if any money was involved in the transaction, and will update this when we hear back.

Update: Lagier has responded, but says that he “cannot share any more information” at this time. Memolane at the time of closure has five staffers, he said.

Memolane was founded back in 2010 and raised a total of $2.5 million in venture capital. The company’s idea of creating an “internet time machine” for easily viewing and exploring your past social networking content on sites such as Facebook and Twitter was certainly compelling — but perhaps a bit too much ahead of its time. Facebook, of course, debuted its own Timeline interface amid much fanfare in September 2011, which many saw as rendering Memolane’s service moot.

In the meantime, Timehop has emerged and garnered a lot of popularity with its own method of letting people walk down memory lane by surfacing past social networking content. Up until now, Memolane has kept up the fight and continued to release more new features, but ultimately it has opted to wave the white flag end its run as standalone entity. In fact, its farewell blog post pointed to both Timehop and Jolicloud as alternatives for its service going forward.

Here is the full text of Memolane’s blog post announcing the closure:

“Here at Memolane, we’ve had an amazing two years helping people see, search and share all of their social media content from across the web. Our goal was to make it exciting to relive great adventures with friends. We are proud that we could bring joy to people’s lives by sending out daily emails with fun memories from the past. As well, it has been a thrill to share in the excitement when one of our fans rediscovers a precious moment that was once lost.

Today we want to share the exciting news that our team is joining another company that will utilize the Memolane features in an expanded way, adding more value to all the great memories captured on social media.

Unfortunately this also means that we will be shutting down the memolane.com service. Your account with Memolane and all its content will be deleted on Friday Feb. 22th 2013. Please note that Memolane only aggregates content so all of your social media memories will still be available on the existing social media services you use.

As well, if you love receiving your daily MemoMail, there are other services which you can use, such as Timehop. JoliCloud also offers a service for accessing all your social media. Check it out!

Since our launch almost three years ago at StartupWeekend CPH 2010, we have seen continued innovation around our vision of rediscovering great memories. With the launch of Facebook Timeline we saw the ultimate validation of our vision.

If you feeling a bit nostalgic then you can read all about how it all started. Also, feel free to send us a message on Twitter or Facebook. Also check out our FAQs post for more information.

Finally, we would like to share a word of heartfelt thanks with our loyal users, partners and our incredible team. We cannot thank you enough for all of your support, feedback, and warm wishes over the years.

And as always…

Keep making great memories, thanks for being part of ours!
Eric, Nikolaj and the Memolane Team”

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Crunchbase

OverviewMemolane is your digital memory - your tool to rediscover your social life on the Internet. Memolane is a digital platform collecting and connecting your thoughts, pictures, messages and music yesterday, today and tomorrow.